David Koch: What WI Gov Walker Is Doing With Unions Is “Critically Important”

The Koch brothers are big backers of union-busting Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Speaking in Palm Beach, David Koch commented on the Walker recall movement and his father’s co-founding of the John Birch Society.

“What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He’s an impressive guy and he’s very courageous,” Koch says after a benefit dinner of salmon and white wine. “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”

…as Koch speaks, he repeatedly uses the phrase “union power” as though it’s interchangeable with the word “Bolshevik” – a new red scare for a new century.

The Koch brothers’ father was obsessed with stopping the Bolsheviks, who had purchased his gasoline refining technology and then used it to finance the Soviet nuclear military complex.

David Koch says his father had no idea who the Bolsheviks were when they first came to his west Texas office asking for his help. Once Fred Koch saw the horrors of Stalin’s purges, he was committed to fighting communism’s spread. Trade unionism and the welfare state represented a creeping, insidious move toward the Bolsheviks, he believed. He became a founding member of the anticommunist John Birch Society in 1958.